Introduction

Hi guys, I am Yasi and this is my 3rd guide for Techies. In this guide, I am going to explain almost everything and all aspects of this hero.
I currently have 600+ games on Techies with 65% win rate on past 6 months as a Legend bracket player. Techies is by far the most underrated hero in the game. He is (or we should better say they are since they are 3 goblins ) an easy to screw up and hard to master hero. Most players (including most Techies players) often underestimate his powers. Since there are already lots of things to explain I will skip the Ability explanations section although I will give you some good tips to use them efficiently. Hope you enjoy it and change your mind about Techies, the best nuker in Dota.

Mentality Guide

Techies is not a high skill cap hero by any mean. All of his spells are straightforward and easy to use but that doesn't mean that it's easy to win with Techies. Playing Techies effectively can be really hard cause he needs you to predict the enemy movement and be ready for it. Unlike other heroes, as a Techies player you should always try to predict the enemies next action in the next 2-3 minutes and prepare yourself for it. Benjamin Franklin says:

Quoted:

By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail

You need to have a good understanding of other heroes playstyles in order to plan for them. Let's say that there is a Bounty Hunter on the enemy team, so at the 3-minute mark you should go and place some mines on your Bounty runes since he will come to contest your runes for sure! I will dedicate a whole section to this part so more on that later.

There are some myths about Techies that are 100% incorrect and that myths are the main reasons making Techies players lose their games. So I will mention them here one by one.

If you agree with any of the sentences above then you should read this guide to understand the true Power and Weaknesses of Techies.
now I will explain why they are not true:

Techies needs a lot of items/mana to be effective so it can't be a good support and also he doesn't have any instant CC to help carries in lane. The Optimal position for Techies is position 4.

You can't be level 10 in 30minute and expect that a level 1 Remote Mines kill anyone at that time. You have one of the best talent trees in the game that gives you XP+Gold per min+mana regen + insane damage/utilities(moving mines) so you need to use them.

I am not saying that you shouldn't defend high ground with Techies but I am not a fan of this strategy at all. I like playing Techies aggressively so most of the times in my Techies game enemy will lose even without getting close to our T3 towers.

Counters/Synergies

Counters:

You might notice that I didn't mention typical Techies counters like Zeus, Nature's Prophet in this list cause I don't believe that they can counter Techies. Zeus with his true sight can for sure cause a lot of problems for you but this also makes a team with Zeus to feel overconfident and refuse to carry a Gem of truesight with them in which you can abuse it in late-game. Nature's Prophet is not only a counter but also a cash machine for you that you can farm his minions.
In my opinion, a good Arc Warden player is the best counter to Techies since he can just send his ult to push and take down your towers without neither him nor his teammates being around.

Semi-counters:
Heroes that I am going to mention below are not necessarily counters but they might force you to play more defensively thus makes you less effective in the game:

Synergies: Techies needs a good start in the early game in order to be effective. so generally any aggressive offlaner is a good hero to go to lane with including:

Good against:
This list contains the heroes that you like to see on enemy team when playing Techies:

As you might notice all the heroes I mentioned have 1 common weakness: they are all squishy and that's extremely important. Theoretically, you can 1 shot every hero in the game with enough amount of mines (except Abaddon with his ult) but that doesn't mean that you should stay in an area for 5 minutes just mining 1 spot over and over again and hope that enemy will walk over it.
So generally when picking Techies you need to make sure that they have at least 2 squishy heroes. I don't recommend to pick Techies as a first or second pick in your team.

Early game

After you bought your stating items you should go to OFFLANE and wait for Bounty Rune. You can even contest enemy Bounty Rune if you have enough CC. Many players underestimate the power of a level 1 Blast Off!. Your goal in the early game is to stay in the trees and poke the SQUISHIEST hero in the lane. Once you got them below 50% hp you can jump on them and get some kills. Your main goal in the offlane is to get early kills so that you can build your items. Let's say that you are facing a Sven + Lion in the offlane, in this case, you should just keep attacking Lion since Sven has really high HP and armor. If you cooperate well with your offlaner you can get at least 2-3 kills before 5 minutes in the game.

Before 15 minutes mark, you should feel free to use your Blast Off! to get the kills for your team. So if you know that if you Blast Off! you will die but your offlaner can get a kill please don't hesitate for suiciding.

Adapt to situation:

Sometimes you might notice that you can't do anything in the offlane. Let's say that you are facing Lifestealer + Ogre Magi in the offlane. Since these heroes are extremely tanky in early game you have almost no kill potential on them. in such cases, you should LEAVE THE OFFLANE. Yeah, you hear me right! you should leave the offlane. just because you marked offlane in the early game doesn't mean that you should stay there forever. If you can't help you offlaner to get kills(and extra xp) just leave him alone.
There are some more situations that might want to leave offlane in the early game, let's say there is a Bounty Hunter on the enemy team that is constantly ganking your Shadow Fiend in mid lane. in this case, you should leave the offlaner alone and go mid lane start mining both sides of the mid lane to stop Bounty Hunter pressuring your mid lane and get some kills. Or even sometimes you might find out that your kill potential in your safe lane is much more than in your offlane. For example, you might see that enemy has Sven + Omniknight in safe lane (in which you have no kill potential on them) But their offlaners are Weaver + Lion (in which you can kill them a lot in early game). In this scenario, you should go to your safe lane to get some kills. You can even rotate mid if you have kill potential there. Don't underestimate the power of your Blast Off!.
Since enemy will almost always try to contest your Bounty Rune, it's always a good idea to mine your runes around 3-minute mark.

As a Techies player is extremely important to communicate with your team to make them fight in the lanes that you have mines on them. Usually, in mid game, you might notice both teams try to fight on a lane ( usually the mid lane). As soon as your team starts fighting somewhere you should go there and start putting Proximity Mines in the trees and escape routes. At the same time, you should try to put some Remote Mines in the middle of the lane ( the closer to enemy's tower (without being seen) the better). Normally, 5 Remote Mines will one-shot a team (unless they have some extremely tanky heroes like Tiny). so don't waste your TIME and MANA by putting 10 mines in the same spot.
If you try to follow my instruction you will notice that you will run out of mana really quickly. In order to maintain your mana don't hesitate to buy 3-4 Claritys every now and then just to keep your mana high. If you watch pro players while playing some mana hungry heroes like Storm Spirit you will notice they always have 2-4 Clarity in their backpack and are constantly using them to maintain their mana and farm with their spells. So please don't hesitate on buying Claritys during the early and mid game. On average I buy around 10-12 Claritys in my games.

Spread the Fear Across the map:

Your enemy should always be afraid of your mines on the map. If you stay for a long time ( e.g 20 minutes) on one lane your enemy will know that you don't have any mine on other lanes so they will push those lanes as hard as possible and they will simply ignore your lane. So in order to avoid it, you should try to show yourself all over the map. Even if you don't have any mine on a lane just showing yourself on that lane will make any wise enemy play a lot safer or at least buy some Sentry Wards. You might also don't want to be seen on other lanes if you can plant your mines without being seen in another lane. Let's say that you went offlane at the start of the game if you can TP to your safe lane and plant bunch of mines without being seen then you should highly avoid being seen on that part of the map to abuse the fact that your enemy won't expect to see your mines in safe lane.

So generally if the enemy is playing aggressively you need to show yourself on all the lanes but if you can mine other lanes without being seen you should do it. In both cases, you should highly avoid staying in a single lane for a long time.

Talent Choice

Techies has a good talent tree. Although most of his talent choices are vaiable most of the times, I always make the same choices till level 20.
At level 10, I always go for +35% XP gained cause it will make you level up much faster.EXECPTION: If you are far ahead in terms of XP and you are 100% sure that you want to take +25 mine movement speed talent in late game you might want to choose -4sec Proximity Mines cooldown talent at level 10.
At level 15, I always go for +6 mana regen cause you need lots of mana and +300 damage on Blast Off! is useless in late game.
At level 20 again +150 GPM is much better than extra move speed. The only talent choice that really matters is your level 25 talent. Each of those talents will change your playstyle and need different item builds. I will explain level 25 talent in detail later in this guide.

If your team is ahead

If you have won the early-mid game, you should try to play aggressivly. Mining your T2 towers when you are so far ahead that your enemy doesn't dare to get close to them is useless. Instead, you should try to push a lane (solo if its safe) and put your mines as close as possible to their towers. You can put some mines around Rosh pit and get Rosh with your teammates. Just pressure their towers and try to mine their jungles instead of yours.

If your team is behind

If you have lost the early-mid then it's time to play safe. You should try to secure the jungle for you cores to farm. You should place Proximity Mines in the entrance routes of your jungles. Also, don't forget to put at least 1 Remote mine in Rosh pit to have vision over that area. Earlier on this guide, I said that you need to farm with Techies and I meant that but if your cores are under-farmed you should never try to contest their farm. You are the 4th priority of farming in the game so don't take their farm.
While you protect your jungle you should also consider planting some Remote Mines on all the lanes in order to punish the enemies that try to take your towers. Most players believe that Techies is a good high ground defender. That's true but I found out that T2 towers are far easier to defend than T3. So your team shouldn't let your T2 towers fall easily just because they have a Techies in their team. Defend them if you can.
Sometimes you don't have the time to protect both your jungle and the lanes. In this case, you need to choose between them and that really depend on your enemy. If they are contesting your jungle more often just focus on protecting your jungle. If they are pushing hard then just focus on your lanes.

Late Game - Great decisions

Techies has one of the best talent trees in the game. His talent tree makes him really versatile in the late game. You have 2 options for level 25 talent and both of them are really strong and useful depending on the situation. Each of these talents needs different items so you need to decide which talent you are going to select before you get to level 25. I start to make my decision when I reach level 20 since you must build items accordingly. So let's start :

I tried to list almost all possible scenarios to go for each one of your talents. The point is that you should choose one of them when you get close to level 25 since you need to itemize accordingly. I will explain the items you might want to buy bellow for every situation:
+251 attack damage talent:
If you have chosen this talent you should start to buy offensive attack speed items. Always keep in mind that Techies has really low agility growth and since +251 damage is already high enough you don't need extra attack damage. The only thing you need is Attack Speed. So First I item you need to buy is Moon Shard but you don't want to use it on yourself before you get 6 slotted since it will give you less attack speed. So generally you need to buy :

Moon Shard to increase your attack speed (you might use it on yourself once you got 6 slotted)

As you might notice if you want to go for +25 movement speed mine there are fewer items that you need to buy. You can still keep your Eul's Scepter of Divinity and also because you don't really want to be in the fights that much so you don't need survival items. This lets you have 1 free slot to build whatever is good for your team like Pipe of Insight, Necronomicon or even just carrying wards all the time.

IMPORTANT: There is one more important thing to do if you want to get +25 mine movement speed talent, you need to start putting lots of Proximity Mines in the map(before reaching level 25) so that as soon as you get your level 25 you can start moving them and stacking them on top of each other. I will explain how to do it later. Just keep in mind that if you are 100% certain that you are going to get +25 mine movement speed talent you should put Proximity Mines as much as you can in the map. You should also put at least one Stasis Trap near every cluster of Proximity Mines.

Tips and Tricks

In this chapter, I am going to mention some tips about Techies. I will divide this section into 2 parts: Basic and Advance tricks. You might find some interesting Features about Techies that even most Techies player don't know. So let's start with Basic tips.

Basic Tips

Quick cast:

If you use Quick-cast to cast your spells in Dota 2 you might find out that since Quick cast will trigger the action as soon as you hit the Button you can't see the exact radius of your mines (especially Proximity Mines). Most players don't know that they can set different keys to their abilities so that they can use one ability both with or without quick cast.
In order to do this, first of all, you need to enable a feature called "Enable advance Quickcast/Autocast hotkeys" in settings.Then from the Hotkey section, you can define different hotkeys for either Quick cast or normal cast so that you can use Normal mode to see the exact radius of your mines before planting them.*Other heroes like Pudge can also benefit from this trick.

Perfectly stacking your mines

The activation/detonation radius of all your mines including Proximity Mines, Stasis Trap and Remote Mines are EXACTLY the same. So if you stack them perfectly on each other once an enemy walk into them Stasis Trap will immediately trigger and root them so they can't move for 3-5 seconds and then the Proximity Mines will also detonate automatically and since it will play a sound before detonation it will alert you to detonate your Remote Mines yourself. I will show you how to perfectly stack your mines in the GIF below:

Once you have learned how to stack your mines on each other there is absolutely no reason for not stacking them. You should always stack your mines. Even when you are planting just Remote Mines always stack them on each other.NOTE: Ther is a little miny bug in the game that will cause your mines to not get stacked perfectly if you plant them close to a tree.

If you are alone in a lane (and you know that you are safe) you can use Blast Off! (rank 3-4) to one-shot creep waves so this way you can save the cooldown of Proximity Mines to plant them around the lane.

since Proximity Mines and Stasis Traps lasts forever and will upgrade when you level up automatically( Stasis Traps won't upgrade but they will last forever anyway) you can basically start mining your base from early game. I am not saying that you stay in base and AFK mine your base at 10-minute mark. But if you are walking in or out of the base and you have Soul Ring on cooldown you should plan a mine somewhere in your base since you might want to defend the high ground later into the game.

General rule for planting mines

As a Techies player there are 3 different areas on the map that you should be aware of :

Areas that you HAVE mines on them

Areas that you DON'T HAVE mines on them

Areas that your ENEMY THINK YOU HAVE mines on them

the rule is that

these areas MUST NEVER EVER COLLIDE!

It might look simple but it's really important to don't mine areas that enemy knows that you have mine on them (e.g. your high ground) since they will either carry a detection or will completely ignore that area which will make your mines useless either way.EXEPTION: There is only one exception for this rule. Sometimes you might want to put mines where enemy knows that you have mines there. You should only do this when you want to deny the enemy access to that area. For example, you might want to always mines your Bounty Rune to avoid enemy from getting your runes.

Stasis Trap is extremely powerful especially in late game. So in the late game, you should put Stasis Trap on random locations and once the enemy got rooted for 3-5 second they should use an important defensive item like Black King Bar or die to your team. This becomes even more important if your enemy has highly mobile heroes like Storm Spirit or Ember Spirit.

A long time ago Techies used to get damaged if someone walked over his mines(or you detonate them) while Blade Mail was active. Those days are gone so you can detonate your enemy while they have activated Blade Mail without taking any damage.

Don't overkill/mine

If the enemy team is squishy (let's say their tankiest hero has around 2800 HP) you shouldn't put 10 mines on a single spot since you can kill them all with 5-6 Remote Mines (assuming you are level 18+ and have Aghanim's Scepter). So don't waste your time by putting so much mines on one-spot that would deal triple the damage you need.

Assists are not bad!

You don't have to necessarily kill an enemy with your mines. Sometimes all your team need is a little bit of damage(or even a silence) to finish a hero off. Don't hesitate on detonating your Remote Mines (or using Blast Off!) if you know that your teammates can get a kill after it.

After buying an Aghanim's Scepter on Techies your sign will also prevent your mines from being revealed by true sight. You can abuse this fact and mine the enemy high ground(or even their fountain) when pushing high ground with your team. All you need to do is putting your Minefield Sign on their high ground and start mining their T3. Since Remote Mines also grant vision this trick is really effective while pushing high ground with your team.

Let's say that enemy is pushing your high ground and you don't have any mine on your high ground. You can put your Minefield Sign on your high ground and you will see that enemy will immediately back off since they don't know that you don't have any mine under it XD XD.

Stack the enemy jungle(except ancients)

No carry player can refuse against the temptation of farming a stacked jungle camp. So you can stack their jungle and put Remote Mines on them. When they come to farm the camp you will detonate the bombs killing both the camp and the carry at once XD. This trick is most effective against melee carries since range carries will stand far away from the camp But in this case, you can put mines a bit further and focus on killing the carry alone.

It might sound weird but putting some mines behind your towers especially when the enemy has diving heroes like Storm Spirit, Ursa or even a farmed Phantom Assassin is really effective. This trick is mostly used on T2-T3 but you can use on T1 if they are constantly diving you in the early game.

This trick can also be really effective since it wil give you vision for the fight and you can get some kills when enemy heroes are trying to escape with low HP.

People will always repeat their actions

As a Techies player you have plenty of free time to watch enemy heroes(especially while you are dead) and learn their movement patterns. I can guarantee that you will find out that most players like to move on special patterns. They like to clear camps from certain spots. Even Tinker players jump on some certain spots most of the times. That's because they are doing these action based on their habits. So by watching your enemy movements you can learn their habits and abuse them. If you saw that a Nature's Prophet player like to always hide on a certain spot and send his minions you should go and put some Remote Mines on that spot later XD.

Adapt to heroes playstyles

Some heroes have special playstyles (including Techies). You should abuse these playstyles. Here is the list of these heroes:

: Ember players like to push a lane alone so you can abuse this fact by putting Remote Mines on creep paths and blow them up. Always keep in mind that you need 1-2 Remote Mines more than usual to kill Ember Spirit since he can shield himself.

/: These heroes like to come in your jungle to ward and grant vision so you can easily counter them by putting Proximity Mines all around the map. Note that Stasis Trap won't trigger on invisible enemies.

: This hero is really mobile and mana hungry. When playing against this hero it's important to have mines on the runes(Since he wants to collect the runes to fill his bottle all the time). You should also try to put lots of Stasis Traps on the map since once he is rooted he is an easy target for your team to kill.

Trails of tear

I learned this technique from @siractionslacks video on youtube. That video is old but that technique is still viable if you want to delay the game. If you want to just delay the game you can put 1 Remote Mines every 1200-1400 range on all the lanes. Those mines won't kill anyone but if your teammate die on a team fight those mines can one-shot creep waves. If you put 3 mines in each lane you can buy enough time for your teammates to respawn and defend.

Outsmart your enemy

You should always be one step ahead of your enemy. If you see that enemy team want to take your T1 tower but they refuse to get close to it, You should put your mines Behind your tower. So always try to think like your enemy and ask yourself what would I do if I were playing against a Techies?

Deal with Heavy pushing Teams

Sometimes your enemy picks 2-3 heavy pushers like Tinker and Nature's Prophet. In such cases there several things that you should do.

Attack with your mines!

If you have gotten +25 mine movement speed talent then you can start putting bunch of Remote Mines near your high ground and send them toward the enemy base. You can do this trick with a stack of Proximity Mines+ one Stasis Trap too but you can't send them in the lane cause creeps will trigger the mines. You can send your Remote Mines cluster in the lane and Proximity Mines cluster in enemies jungle.

Conclusion

Hope you have enjoyed this guide and hope you have changed your mind about the power of Techies. If you are new to Techies please don't play him in ranks cause he is a little bit tricky.
Feel free to add a comment and let me know about your favorite builds and playstyle with Techies.